President Barack Obama, speaking as Newtown continued to bury victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, announced Wednesday that he would present Congress in January with new measures to address gun violence. Vice President Joe Biden will lead a multidisciplinary task force looking into the problem. The president made plain that the initiative, as it must, won't stop at firearms.

"We are going to need to work on making access to mental-health care at least as easy as access to guns," the president said.

On Wednesday, as the president spoke, the Editorial Board hosted a roundtable discussion on the gun culture, gun violence prevention, school safety, and mental-health issues. Local experts discussed next steps in the post-Sandy Hook era, as more Americans reach the conclusion that the status quo on guns must change. Priorities and viewpoints of our panelists at times overlapped or diverged.

But consensus was reached on this: All aspects of the discussion must continue, and all aspects must be addressed. "These are not mutually exclusive items," said Dr. Joe Zweig, director of Jawonio's Personalized Recovery Oriented Services program.

Failure to act

Pace Law School professor Bennett L. Gershman ticked off the list of mass shootings over the decades.

After each, he said, the outcry is the same: "Let's get serious about gun violence; and we haven't." Inaction, he said, comes not from the law but from the politics; he noted that recent Supreme Court rulings on firearms left plenty of room for public policymakers to shape smarter gun laws.

Panelist DJ Jaffe, founder of the New York Treatment Advocacy Coalition and of Mental Illness Policy Org., said the current mental-health system fails the most seriously ill. Those who deny their illness, and decline treatment, end up left to deteriorate and sometimes commit crimes.

Failing to invest in treatment of the severely mentally ill just pushes the problem to the criminal-justice system: "The largest mental hospital ... is Rikers Island," he said.

School safety also must be taken more seriously, said school security consultant Matthew Miraglia and Isabel Burk, schools safety coordinator for Southern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

Both pointed out that recent security upgrades at Sandy Hook most likely stopped even more deaths from occurring.

Catalyst for change?

Will the latest bloodletting serve as a catalyst for change? Dr. Jim Bostic, executive director of Nepperhan Community Center in Yonkers expressed hope. But he also noted that gun violence haunts America's cities every day, and people have become inured.

New gun laws, better security and enhanced mental-health services will not completely shield us from more carnage. But as Miraglia said Wednesday, "If we truly collaborate, we can come up with some viable solutions."

Obama said Wednesday: "The fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing." Let's hope action won't have to wait for the next time.